No-deal Brexit disruption at UK ports might last as long as six months: minister

FILE PHOTO – Pharmaceutical tablets and capsules in foil strips are organized on a desk on this image illustration taken in Ljubljana September 18, 2013. REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic

LONDON (Reuters) – A no-deal Brexit might trigger as much as six months of disruption at some ports, a British minister warned on Friday, vowing to prioritise prescribed drugs because the UK develops contingency plans lower than 4 months earlier than it is because of depart the EU.

Members of parliament look set to vote down Prime Minister Theresa Could’s Brexit deal subsequent week, hurtling the world’s fifth-largest financial system into even deeper uncertainty and leaving open quite a lot of attainable outcomes together with a disorderly Brexit.

Well being minister Matt Hancock wrote to medicine firms in August to make sure they’d at the very least six weeks’ value of medicines in Britain however on Friday he instructed any potential disruption might last more.

Hancock recognized southern English crossings on the ports of Dover and Folkestone as areas which might be notably affected.

“Revised cross-government planning assumptions present that there will likely be considerably decreased entry throughout the brief straits, for as much as six months. That is very a lot a worst-case situation,” he mentioned in a letter to healthcare suppliers on Friday.

Companies in lots of sectors have been shopping for warehousing area and stockpiling to make sure they will meet demand and maintain manufacturing going within the occasion that the frictionless motion of products to and from the continent is misplaced.

Britain is planning to make use of aeroplanes and fast-track vehicles to make sure the continued provide of medicines if it leaves the European Union with no deal, Hancock mentioned, and can give choice to medicines within the face of competing pressures.

“The federal government has additionally agreed that medicines and medical merchandise will likely be prioritised on these different routes to make sure that the move of all these merchandise will proceed unimpeded after 29 March 2019,” he wrote.